Can You Beat Amazon at Their Game? 🕒 5 min read By Frank Hurtte The vultures are circling again.   Every few years, the doomsayers resurface: Amazon's eating distribution. E-commerce is the death of wholesale. Distributors are obsolete. The headlines are predictable. The advice? Equally predictable and predictably wrong.   Build your own Amazon. Hire consultants to help you compete on speed and price. Invest millions in e-commerce platforms. Match their logistics. Underprice the giants.   If you take that advice, you'll lose. And you'll waste time, money, and energy doing it. Here's why: You're competing on their battlefield instead of yours. W hat Amazon Does Better (And Always Will) Let's be honest. Amazon, Grainger, Faire, and the newer B2B marketplaces have invested billions in logistics, data, and algorithms. A mid-sized distributor can't match their speed or price. Competing on those terms is like a neighborhood bookstore trying to o...

A Perfect Failure Part 4: Expecting Your Suppliers to be Perfect 🕒 2 min read By Frank Hurtte Expecting perfection from suppliers is like expecting the weather forecast to be right every day. Helpful, usually. Perfect, never. Some salespeople expect the regional sales manager to know every answer, the application engineer to solve technical problems with a snap of the fingers, and the factory to deliver every order the next day, come rain, shine, or global supply-chain crisis. That's a fairy tale, not a reality. I've worked with hundreds of manufacturer representatives over my career. A few were exceptional. A few probably couldn't be trusted to water houseplants. Most fell somewhere in between. The common denominator wasn't perfection. They were all human beings trying to serve customers in an imperfect world. Customers don't judge us by whether our suppliers occasionally stumble. They judge us by how well we respond when the organic material hits the rotat...